Biruk notes her own complicity in the systems she is critiquing highlighlighting how "anthropologists make global health in the process of studying in, and continue to be as "doubly ambivalent,...Read more
Biruk highlights that the demographic surveys she studies "raise the specter of the exploitation, extractive logics, racism, and ethnocentrism that have underlain science in Africa," (22)....Read more
Biruk notes extensive research fatique by Malawi participants and states: "residents across sub-Saharan Africa have now become accustomed to projects in their midst," (23). In her conclusion...Read more
Biruk highlights that "a main point of controversy between anthroplogists and demographers is how they might answer the question: "what is the relationship between data and social reality it...Read more
Biruk hones in on quantitative demographic health data in Malawi as the "science" she chooses to study. Throughout the book she draws on her experience as an anthropologist and compares the...Read more
Biruk challenges the abstract universality of data, seen as unanchored from its site and relations of produciton, by demonstrating through her ethnography how Malawi and Malawians shaped it...Read more
Biruk builds on scholarly discourse (called critical data studies?; sociology of quantification?) about how numbers, categories and statistics are produced by their social contexts and actors. Read more
Biruk's first footnote states: "All project and personal names in this book are anonymized. ... Researchers were, for the most part, amenable to being mentioned by name and having their projects...Read more
Biruk writes that she hopes the book will reflect the potential of anthropology's commitment to "slow research" but also prompt anthropologists to "reflect on how our own data activities...Read more
